Glowing Dinosaursby Firoiu Dan Nicolae Reserve a copy
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Part five

The artist and the series

Firoiu Dan Nicolae and the Glowing Series.

Portrait of Firoiu Dan Nicolae

The artist

Firoiu Dan Nicolae

Artist, producer and curator

The founder of Coco Agency. He began in music: as the psytrance act Whicked Hayo, as manager of Juno Reactor, and for a decade as festival director of Rhakti Dei and Tribes Gathering in Belgium.

He then turned to exhibitions, creating and touring shows such as Dino Planet, Living Dragons and Giant Bugs, and curating Living Dinosaurs, seen by more than 12 million visitors. The Glowing Series brings that sense of spectacle to the page. He lives in Sofia.

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From the stage to the page

Firoiu Dan Nicolae is an artist, producer and curator, the founder of Coco Agency, and the author and artist of the Glowing Series. He lives and works in Sofia.

He began in music. He performed as the psytrance act Whicked Hayo, worked as manager of Juno Reactor, and for a decade was festival director of Rhakti Dei and Tribes Gathering in Belgium. Festivals taught him how light, sound and a crowd can turn a field into another world for a night, and that sense of spectacle has stayed with him in everything he has made since.

He then turned to exhibitions. As founder of Coco Agency, he has created and toured shows such as Dino Planet, Living Dragons, Giant Bugs and Glowing Garden, and he curated Living Dinosaurs. Together they have been seen by more than twelve million visitors. He has made exhibitions for more than ten years, and the habits of that work run through the books: thinking about how a visitor walks through a room, what they see first, and what makes a family stop and look.

An art style of his own

His art style is recognisable at a glance. Each creature appears as living glass, lit from within, its inner structure of bone, muscle and nerve glowing through in neon colour against pure black. In the deep sea, where animals make their own light, the style found its natural subject in Glowing Oceans. Among insects and spiders, in Glowing Bugs, it turned the smallest animals into jewels. With the dinosaurs, it does something different: it takes animals known only from stone and gives them back a body.

The epigraph he wrote for the book says it in one line: Where others see a fossil, I see a spectrum.

Spectacle with care

The Glowing Series pairs that spectacle with care. The plates are free; the facts are not. For each book he has worked with sources from the start, tracing every statement to a paper, a museum or a book, and planning a specialist reading before print. The aim is a book that a child opens for the pictures and an adult trusts for the text.

The Glowing Series

Glowing Dinosaurs is volume IV of the series. It follows Glowing Oceans, the creatures of the deep sea that make their own light; Glowing Bugs, insects, spiders and other small creatures as living glass; and Most Dangerous Bugs, its companion. Glowing Dinosaurs has its own companion, Most Dangerous Dinosaurs. Each atlas can also become an exhibition, so a venue that shows one series one year can show another the next, each with its own book.

For the book, the exhibitions, the animatronics or a conversation about working together, write to him at Coco Agency.

The Glowing Series

Glowing Dinosaurs is volume IV of a series of luminous atlases, each pairing glowing portraits with checked natural history.

  • Cover of Glowing Oceans

    Glowing Oceans

    The creatures of the deep sea that make their own light.

  • Cover of Glowing Bugs

    Glowing Bugs

    Insects, spiders and other small creatures as living glass.

  • Cover of Most Dangerous Bugs

    Most Dangerous Bugs

    The companion to Glowing Bugs: the biters, the stingers and the carriers of disease.

  • Cover of Glowing Dinosaurs
    Volume IV

    Glowing Dinosaurs

    101 dinosaurs, from the first small hunters to the last giants.

  • Cover of Most Dangerous Dinosaurs
    Cover in preparation

    Most Dangerous Dinosaurs

    Its companion: 24 animals and their weapons.

Why glowing animals

The Glowing Series began with a simple idea: to draw living things as if light came from inside them, so that bone, muscle and form could be seen at a glance. In Glowing Oceans the subject was the deep-sea creatures that really do make their own light. In Glowing Dinosaurs the light is an invention, a way of bringing animals known only from stone back to life, while every fact beside the pictures stays true to the science.

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